I’m enjoying David Pogue’s book Apple: The First 50 Years, as it’s bringing back a lot of memories.

Not that I was an Apple fan during its first 25 years or so. When I first discovered computers in the early 1980s, I pretty much avoided Apple and found them annoying. Unlike Microsoft, which I hated with a passion, even before they teamed up with IBM and released DOS on the world.

But I couldn’t help but follow the ups and downs of Apple and the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, as they were constantly in the tech news.   

I had formed opinions of the two Steves, based on rather incomplete information back then. I thought of Steve Wozniak as a brilliant tech guy who was behind whatever innovative tech advances Apple had made. And I considered Steve Jobs as a ruthless asshole who exploited Wozniak and everyone around him to get what he wanted.

It would be years before I developed a more nuanced picture of Jobs.

Meanwhile, Pogue’s book is filled with delightful details about Woz such as this.

The Woz Plan

Some original Apple team members remember Apple’s IPO with more bitterness than affection.

Apple’s policy was to offer stock options to full-time employees, but not to hourly contractors. Unfortunately, that latter category included many of the guys who had helped the two Steves create their first machines. Randy Wigginton, Chris Espinosa, and Bill Fernandez received no stock at all.

Most shocking was the case of Daniel Kottke: Jobs’s best friend at Reed, his travel companion in India, Apple’s very first paid employee, working in the Jobs garage to assemble Apple I boards. And after all of this, “Steve just cut me. He cut me off. He iced me,” Kottke says. “Everyone I worked with became a millionaire. Everyone.”

Wozniak, horrified, responded by devising the Woz Stock Plan. It had two parts. First, he offered up to 2,000 of his own shares at his own option price—$5, far below the $22 opening-bell price—to about 40 marketing executives, engineers, and others who’d been issued only small amounts of stock. “Almost everybody who participated in the Woz Plan ended up being able to buy a house and become relatively comfortable,” Woz says. “I’m glad of that.”

The other part of the Woz Plan covered those earliest Apple employees, that small circle of his best and oldest friends. “These employees weren’t just around,” Woz says. “I thought of them as part of the family, the family that had helped me design the Apple I and Apple II computers.”

Over the discomfort of Apple’s lawyers and accountants, Woz gifted them thousands of his shares outright, worth about $1 million per person.

To this day, Chris Espinosa hangs on to the pink “While You Were Out” slip from the Bandley 4 receptionist. It said that a broker at Morgan Stanley needed to talk to him. “An account had been created in my name with a notable amount of shares of Apple stock, and he needed my Social Security number,” he says. “I ended up using that as a down payment on a house.”

Woz is the first to tell you that the Woz Plan barely impacted his own wealth; he and his wife, Alice, bought a lovely house in Scotts Valley, in the middle of the Santa Cruz Mountains. But to this day, tech historians hold up the legend of the Woz Plan as a rare example of a tech founder spreading the wealth instead of hoarding it.

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